10 Visual Feasts Not to Miss During Frieze New York Week

As the energy of spring wraps around New York’s streets, the pulse of the art world begins to beat with Frieze Week. Amid the excitement of the 2026 Whitney Biennial, the reopening of the New Museum, and the echoes of the ‘Greater New York’ exhibition at MoMA PS1, museums and galleries across the city are transforming into visual temples. Here are 10 unmissable institutional exhibitions that will nourish your mind and soul during this art marathon — where the works breathe right in front of you.

1. Marcel Duchamp: The Dance of Thought and Retina (MoMA | 12 April – 22 August 2026)
   MoMA’s “American, born in France” Duchamp returns with his first major U.S. retrospective since 1973. As you wander through the exhibition, you can see how the delicate and mysterious cracks on the glass surface of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) fracture the light like a cathedral window. Or Étant donnés (1966), that voyeuristic and proto-Lynchian world behind a wooden door, creates an optical illusion in your mind while making you question the concept of the “readymade” once again in the age of artificial intelligence.
2. Carol Bove: The Grace of Steel (Guggenheim | until 2 August 2026)
   In Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda architecture, Carol Bove’s monumental steel sculptures seem to defy gravity. Massive steel masses painted in bright primary colours, rusted, or elegantly draped as if they were fabric, blur the line between softness and hardness. You can sit in the rest areas Bove has created within the exhibition space and catch a glimpse, through the opening in the Guggenheim’s wall, of Joan Miró’s vibrant Alicia (1965–67) ceramic mural, which is usually hidden from view.
3. Lee Ufan: The Encounter of Silence (Dia Beacon | from 8 May 2026)
   If you escape the noise of the city and head toward the Hudson Valley, you will encounter this profound exhibition celebrating Lee Ufan’s 90th birthday. The Mono-ha sculptures, where stone, steel, and glass come together in their purest forms, speak with the emptiness around them. The heavy, motionless shadow cast by a natural rock on an industrial steel plate allows you to witness the birth moment of Minimalism.
4. Raphael: Sublime Poetry (Metropolitan Museum of Art | 29 March – 28 June 2026)
   We descend into the heart of the Renaissance. Standing before Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione (c.1514–15), you can almost feel the texture of his fur-collared garment and the wise, calm expression in his eyes. This masterpiece — which even Rembrandt saw and quickly sketched — along with 170 other works in the exhibition, tells a poetic tale poured from Raphael’s genius brush, a Renaissance dream woven in gold.
5. Christelle Oyiri: The Labyrinth of Faith (Amant | until 16 August 2026)
   The Paris-based artist’s video work Hauntology of an OG (2025) begins under the neon lights of the massive pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee (formerly a stadium, now a shopping centre). The symbolic overlap between ancient Egyptian iconography and African American belief systems echoes through the voice of rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton, drawing the viewer into a cultural labyrinth.
6. Josiane M H Pozi: In Pursuit of Feeling (American Academy of Arts & Letters | until 3 July 2026)
   From pixelated images of an internet chat room to scattered, momentary, and deeply personal dramas extending into Serpentine Gallery’s spaces… Pozi’s video installations function like a hall of mirrors. The rapidly flowing fragments of modern existence on screen slap us in the face with how fragile and multiplying our digital identities truly are.
7. Iris van Herpen: Shaping the Senses (Brooklyn Museum | 16 May – 6 December 2026)
   In a darkened room, accompanied by a soundscape prepared by Salvador Breed, more than 140 Iris van Herpen designs shimmer. These dresses, where laser-cut plexiglass, silk, and mesh fabrics come together in biomimetic forms (corals, skeletons, neural networks), hang in the air like breathing, otherworldly creatures risen from the depths of the ocean.
8. Old Masters, New Amsterdam (New York Historical Society | 1 May – 30 August 2026)
   17th-century Dutch landscapes from the brushes of Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals take the viewer 400 years back in time, to the days when Manhattan was a small trading post. The dark and hazy landscapes, along with dimly lit domestic scenes inside wooden houses, bring to mind how today’s vast metropolis once looked like a modest Dutch village.
9. Tromarama: On Top of a Machine (The Kitchen | 23 April – 13 June 2026)
   The installation by the Indonesian collective Tromarama invites the viewer into a karaoke space where nostalgia and digital algorithms collide. Sounds and images “remixed” by generative artificial intelligence using data from Donald Duck comics and personal digital libraries stage our commodified concept of entertainment in a colourful, chaotic, and ironic way.
10. Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures (El Museo del Barrio | 23 April – 2 August 2026)
    The streets of 1970s and 80s Manhattan… In black-and-white gelatin silver prints, the tired yet proud expressions on the faces of Latinx people commuting on the subway, walking the streets, or cheering at Yankee Stadium. Rivera’s “Latino Portraits” series reveals rare spotlight moments of the city’s invisible workers with shattering intimacy and deep contrasts.